Forge of Heaven (3 page)

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 3

Nobody wanted a return to the bad old days of the Gene Wars: no one wanted the
ondat
to resume their attacks or retaliate in kind. The
ondat
seemed happy as long as they had regular reports from Marak Trin Tain, and apparently cared little for communications from the station itself.

But rumors of immortality scared Earth. Earth, overpopulated as it was, could see social collapse if the immortality modification ever reached the black market . . . and only the information needed travel.The Outsiders’ entire hope to remediate the political situation with the
ondat
hinged on their team’s efforts to rehabilitate Marak’s World—and on the contact they maintained with the
ondat,
and on the
ondat’s
fixation on Marak’s successful, healthy life.The Outsiders wanted no provocative new tech to exit the world, but they were glad enough to know their team was as immortal as Marak—the team, by now, having a tremendous accumulated knowledge . . .

and being, like Marak, one constant that transcended the careers of individual administrators in orbit.

So everyone stayed. Everyone carried on above, on Concord, as if this ages-long occupation of a ruined world and a handful of immortals were the modus vivendi they had discovered.To Concord Station, the curious situation was forever, a condition of life like light and warmth, essential, but the maintenance of which happened outside the understanding of nine-tenths of the lives inside Concord’s spinning wheel.The population had diversified far, far beyond the scientific mission.

Commerce went on. Human lives did, briefer than what they observed.

In the mind-bogglingly long time since the Gene Wars, new civilizations sprang up. Governments and institutions rose and fell. Languages and cultures changed. The Ruined Worlds deep inside Outsider territory grew stranger and stranger, one with continents nearly covered in algaes and slimes, one with a population that could no longer be called in any sense human.

Marak’s World, however, showed signs of health. The population had been ordinary humans in most particulars: they still were.The surface of the world was metal-poor. Newly arrived metals, largely aimed to miss the area of human habitation, were mostly inaccessible to them. That had not changed. But the reawakened geologic forces that were rearranging the planet would change that picture, bringing up metals from the core—slowly, over time only the immortals could survive.

Meanwhile the Refuge maintained a few aircraft of fused fiber; it used trucks of metal, fused fiber, and cast ceramics. It had brought down fusion 1 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

for its own needs. It harnessed water, wind, biomass, and solar power, the latter fragile in the vast, long-lasting sandstorms. Fuel cells provided power for outlying installations, but the fuel cells themselves used scarce materials.

Life showed signs of health in this new age. Technology struggled, not according to ancient patterns, but making ample use of exotic, synthesizing nanochemistry. For civilization, it was still an uphill climb.

The Concord Station that now monitored the planet was the third station to orbit there, the other two outmoded and abandoned, the
ondat
having transferred their section as a unit to each in turn. A fourth station was under construction, a subject of the usual debate and wrangling, but nothing important was likely to change when the population migrated over to it. Concord still spoke the language it had always spoken. It still believed what it had believed.The
ondat
still sought their daily information on Marak.

Only outward appearances and trends underwent revision, never the laws that governed its interaction with others.

Life was comfortable for all concerned at Concord.

Biological change on Marak’s World was a slow process . . . and a constant guarantee of employment.

.

ii

Positional Map

Not to scale

human

Earth

Inner

Worlds

Outsider Space

Apex

Concord

ondat

Ondat

homeworld

iii

Power

EARTH AND ITS ENVIRONS

E A R T H , W I T H I T S F E D E R AT I O N of the Sol System planets and moons, Luna, Mars, et al. Its current center of government: Adacion, in New Brazil, its legislature comprised of representatives of ten regional earthly councils, plus five space-based councils.

Earth maintains strict immigration control over its space. Its large military establishment, partly robotic, enforces the Quarantine Laws.

Earth appoints governors for all stations, except Apex. Earth made the Treaty that ended the Gene Wars, and Earth continues to enforce Treaty Law.

It does not permit immigration and does not trade in material goods.

THE INNER WORLDS

From roughly twelve lights of Earth outward to a distance of twenty lights: three successfully colonized worlds and fourteen stations in the area are administered by Earth governors.They are much more Earthlike than Outsider in philosophy and law, and impose purity laws nearly as stringent as Earth’s.

OUTSIDERS

Comprising the bulk of the human species, Outsiders remain nominally under Earth government, as regards Treaty Law, but govern themselves and trade freely.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 7

APEX

Apex Station, the military and governmental center of Outsider culture, orbits an Earthlike planet, Apex Prime, which has been successfully, though sparsely, colonized.

The Apex High Council elects the Chairman General, the chief executive over Outsider Space.The High Council, called the Apex Council everywhere but on Apex, appoints the Supreme Judiciary as well as the twenty-odd chairmen who serve as Outsider executive authority on stations throughout Outsider Space. These chairmen share civil power with Earth-appointed governors on various stations, and have authority over Outsider citizens, whether in trade or civil law.

THE RUINED WORLDS

Four sites, including Aldestra and Luzan, inhabited worlds, once subject to ill-advised terraforming, and carefully monitored from orbit. Direct contact is not permitted. Aldestra possesses a seasonally nomadic culture. Luzan’s population clings to life.

OTHER OUTSIDER STATIONS

Orb, Arc, Serine, Momus, and the other Outsider stations all have a bilevel government. Earth-born governors serve as the station executive, overseeing maintenance, heavy manufacturing, and trade, and ruling over a separate society of Earthborn and Earth-affiliated citizens, who are generally financiers, traders, industrialists, technicians, occasional religionists, and providers of specialized services—all well-educated, generally well-monied individuals.

Earthers are relatively few in number on the stations they govern—a layer of technical administration serving to keep the station mechanicals working and guaranteeing stability. Like gravity on a planet, it costs relatively little, has assured a firm footing for a long time, and no one is particularly interested in challenging it.

More numerous, Outsiders reside usually on a separate deck, with their own trading associations, hospitals, social services, and mercantile endeavors, their political factions, and their labs—that essentially defining item of Outsider culture. Outsider trade and use of biotech nanisms make Earthers very reluctant to mingle with the darker elements of Outsider com-

1 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

munities.This guarantees that real law enforcement rests with the Outsider Council and the local chairman.

CONCORD STATION

Marak’s World might be counted as a fifth Ruined World, except for the extensive remediation efforts that are an ongoing basis of Earth-Outsider-ondat cooperation, on which the all-important Treaty rests, and no one ever suggests failure. Its solar system, of which it is now the sole life-bearing planet, lies within that region of unintended overlap between
ondat
and human space.

Concord Station is an important trade partner of Apex, Arc, and Orb. It speaks a language ages-vanished, and all incoming media have to be translated for the majority of its citizenry.

Concord’s governor is, as elsewhere, Earth-appointed. Its Outsider chairman is Apex-appointed. No one understands how the
ondat
observer is chosen . . . but one exists here, making Concord unique among stations:
ondat
ships visit here, another anomaly.The total
ondat
population at Concord is fewer than five—humans think. No one asks or knows what their power structure may be, how long they stay, or what they report to their distant authority. No one has ever gotten a clear view of an
ondat,
though shadowy images are in classified files.

The Planetary Office installation, whose director is appointed by the Apex Council and who reports to that body, is unique to Concord.The PO, as it is called, constitutes an Outsider authority independent of ordinary station administration, one specifically charged with overseeing remediation efforts on Marak’s World.

That three nations and two species can coexist here argues that an
ondat
-human peace, like planetary life, is evolving slowly.There seems to be progress.

But remediation, and therefore the peace itself, is still in doubt.

Forge of

Heaven

1

G RO Z N Y WA S W H E R E L E B E AU Street mingled with the Style, where the low haunts of Blunt Street flowed into the Trend and rubbed shoulders with the rich and carefree.

Heart of the Trend on Concord Station, Grozny Street, where the Style walked side by side with gray-suited, slumming Earthers from exclusive upper levels, the ruling class making their own statement in shades of pearl and charcoal. Flashing newsboards warred, streaming stock and futures tickers under cosmetic adverts and the dockside news. A ship from Earth was coming in.

That
was major news, rare and interesting, but it didn’t immediately affect the Trend, and it didn’t affect Procyon, né Jeremy Stafford, walking home from dinner, an easy stroll through the neon and the crowds.

There was Jonah’s Place, and The Ox, there was Right Ascension, Farah’s, and La Lune Noir, there was The Body Shop and the Blue Lounge—and the Health Connection, which cleaned up the Body Shop’s done-on-a-whims. There was Tia Juana’s, the Ethiopia, and the high-toned Astral Plane . . . not to mention the exclusive little shops that sold everything from designer genes to boots—and there was The Upper Crust, that very nice little pastry shop that Procyon did his best to stay out of.

The whole station came to Grozny to relax—well, except those solid citizens content with the quiet little establishments in their own zones, or with the output of their own kitchens. Most day-

2 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

timers to Grozny took the lift system into the Trend. Very few citizens had the cachet or the funds to live here.

But Jeremy—who preferred to be Procyon—had the funds, a fact clear enough in the cut of the clothes, the precious metals of the bracelets, the small, tasteful modifications that an observer might automatically suspect were at issue here, since the body was good-looking.

He was twenty-five and single. He was a former Freethinker turned Fashionable because he liked it, not because he lived by the social tyranny of the Stylists. And he was fit and in condition the hard way, not because he had any great fear of mods, but because of a certain personal discipline. He spent every third night working out at Patrick’s Gym, every next night taking laps at the Speed Rink, and only every seventh night carousing with friends down at Tia Carmen’s or wherever else their little band of affluent young professionals decided to gather.

He had turned toward home tonight from that seventh-night gathering, warm with drink and the recollection of good company. Home was a little behind the main frontage of Grozny, so to speak, a T-shaped pocket, a pleasantly lit little dead-end street called Grozny Close, which protected its hundred or so apartments from the traffic and rush and the slightly higher crime rate of Grozny Street proper.

Number 201 Grozny Close, sandwiched between a highly successful lawyer and a retired surgeon, had a blue door, a shining chrome arch, and a tall orchid tree that Grozny Close maintenance changed out whenever its blooms failed. The whole Close was a riot of such well-kept gardens, and the air consequently smelled less of the restaurants out on the street and far more of the lawyer’s gardenias.

The button beside the door knew his thumbprint and let him in, and after the security system looked him over and decided he was absolutely the owner, the floor lifted him up to the main level, the middle one.

It wasn’t a huge apartment. It had fine amenities—the wall-to-wall entertainment unit in the main room was his life’s greatest extravagance, the one he personally most enjoyed. But, being he’d had a few drinks, it was upstairs that drew him more than the evening news, which he knew was going to be full of speculation on that inbound ship and no real information at all.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 3

Boring stuff. And he was too tired to order a sim, which cost, and which would run longer than he would stay awake. He took the few steps up, undressed, and slipped into the floating, drifting serenity of his own bed.

Eyes shut. Perfect. Not a care in the world.

Except—

Damn.

Eyes wide open. His parents’ anniversary. He’d forgotten to get the requisite present.

“Sam,” he moaned. Sam was what he called the computer.

“Sam, day reminder for 0830h, onquote: anniversary, endquote.

Night, Sam.”

“Good night,” Sam said sweetly, not questioning the enigma of the note. “Sleep tight.”

His mother had used to say that. Whimsy or guilty secret, it put him in a mind to rest, so he assigned it to Sam. Sleep tight.

Duty was done. Work tomorrow. Life was very good.

M O R N I N G B E C A M E A suspicion in the east. The beshti set to munching the nearby brush, a noisy activity, distraction to a man trying to sleep in his tent until after the sun rose. But so was a wife with notions of lovemaking. Hati was determined, and Marak Trin Tain never refused that request.